AI Talent Wars: Xiaomi's Strategic Move in Large Language Models
Xiaomi’s founder Lei Jun has reportedly offered a million-yuan salary package to recruit Luo Fuling, a key developer of DeepSeek-V2, marking the company’s ambitious push into AI development amid fierce talent competition in China’s tech sector.
The AI landscape in China is witnessing an unprecedented talent war as major tech companies vie for top researchers and developers. At the center of recent attention is Luo Fuling, a rising star in AI development who graduated from Peking University in China with a master’s degree in computational linguistics.
Luo’s impressive trajectory began during her graduate studies when she published eight papers at ACL, a prestigious international conference in natural language processing, with two as first author. This remarkable achievement put her in the spotlight of China’s AI community.
After graduation, Luo joined Alibaba DAMO Academy, where she led the development of VECO, a multilingual pre-training model incorporated into the AliceMind framework. Her work at DAMO Academy demonstrated her expertise in cross-language understanding and generation, crucial capabilities for modern AI systems.
In 2022, Luo transitioned to DeepSeek, where she played a pivotal role in developing DeepSeek-V2, an open-source large language model that gained international recognition for its performance and cost-effectiveness. The model notably achieved comparable capabilities to leading global models at a fraction of the cost.
Xiaomi’s interest in Luo aligns with their strategic expansion into AI. The company has significantly increased its AI investments, planning to spend 24 billion yuan on R&D in 2024 and 30 billion yuan in 2025. Their AI lab, established in April 2023, already houses 3,000 professionals and operates with 6,500 GPUs, with plans to expand to over 10,000 GPUs.
Lei Jun’s approach to AI development differs from competitors. Rather than competing on raw computational power, Xiaomi focuses on lightweight models and local deployment. This strategy resonates with the company’s value-for-money philosophy across its product lines, from smartphones to electric vehicles.
The recruitment of Luo represents more than just a high-profile hiring. It signals Xiaomi’s commitment to developing proprietary AI capabilities that could integrate across their ecosystem of products. With Xiaomi’s extensive user base across smartphones, smart home devices, and now electric vehicles (with their SU7 model exceeding 130,000 orders), they possess valuable data resources for AI development.
This move comes at a crucial time as Xiaomi’s market position strengthens, with their stock reaching its highest point since 2022. The intersection of AI expertise and Xiaomi’s hardware ecosystem could potentially reshape the competitive landscape in consumer technology.
The investment in AI talent and infrastructure positions Xiaomi to leverage deep learning capabilities across their product range, potentially creating unique advantages in user experience and device integration. This strategic focus on AI development could significantly influence their future market position in the rapidly evolving tech industry.